


Friendship Is (Space) Magic

by Project0506



Series: Soft Wars [104]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Brothers, Brothers being assholes, Family, Gen, magic space rocks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-06
Updated: 2020-08-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:48:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25744600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Project0506/pseuds/Project0506
Summary: Fox makes his beloved brothers some friendship bracelets.  Everyone is immediately, understandably, suspicious.(Prompt: Fox, Friendship bracelets)
Series: Soft Wars [104]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1683775
Comments: 34
Kudos: 464





	Friendship Is (Space) Magic

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Anything_or_Everything](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anything_or_Everything/gifts).



“They’re hideous,” Neyo breathes, face alight with devilish glee. He isn’t wrong. Gree and Colt share a wary look.

“They’re certainly…” Gree has many languages in his arsenal and he adds more bits of phrases every year. He still doesn’t have a word that quite fits. “Colorful.”

“They look like you fed an entire Er’Kith rock garden to a septic tooka and who then shi-”

“One more word and you’re demoted,” Colt barks and Neyo snaps his mouth shut. Gree eats his pasta. He carefully doesn’t wince.

They’re honestly not entirely sure how to act around Neyo sometimes. None of them really remember much of what it was like _before_ ; there's just enough to know that things are different now. With them, with Neyo. Especially with Neyo. They can’t read him like they read each other anymore. It’s… difficult.

“It’s a joke,” Fox says before silence can fester. He and Colt both pretend Gree got all the intelligence among them, but Fox was always the fastest on recovery.

“It is _not_ a joke,” Colt sniffs. “I have a very delicate constitution thank you.” And Colt was always the best at reading people. Neyo grins.

He slinks sleen-like in his booth and his dark eyes watch them all for long seconds, evaluating even as his smile shades to unsettlingly wide. “I’ll keep all descriptions of bowel movements until after dessert.”

"That's all I ask." Colt gestures imperiously with his spoon. “Please carry on bullying Fox.”

It’s difficult, Gree thinks as Neyo uncurls from venomous readiness to easy slouch, but it’s more than worth it. He knocks an ankle against Neyo’s; gets a toothy smirk in response. He smiles. A lot has changed, but one thing hasn't: Neyo still looks unsettlingly like Fox. Gree gets a sudden echo of a memory: Alpha Six towering in amused frustration, Neyo and Fox claiming to be tubies, insisting it would be cruel to make them sleep in separate grown-up bunks. Fox had badly faked a lisp to seem cuter.

There were good days. There were mostly good days, if the soft haze of Gree's memory is to be believed. He laughs and shakes himself back to present.

“He deserves it, considering he clearly brought us post-digestive presents.” Gree downs the rest of his hot cheesy pasta and makes a note to see if he can wheedle what it was from the Roger that had dumped it on their table in passing. They're at 'Shut Up And Eat': you don't order here and there's no menu. You'll Eat What You're Given And You'll Karking Like It, or so says the motto etched into the tabletop.

Three offending excuses for jewelry haunt the middle of the 'Karking', right next to a slowly creeping puddle condensation from the chilled glass of sweet milky whatever-it-is Gree had traded for Fox’s bubbly, cucumbery thing. They’re bracelet-sized and shaped at least, a ring of rough, discolored, misshapen lumps of rock threaded together on circles of industrial wire. Gree would have dismissed them as the galaxy’s laziest handicraft, if it hadn’t clearly taken _work_ to find rocks that ugly. And if Fox hadn’t clearly taken care to make sure all three only sported clashing rocks.

Gree is 38% positive that streak of gray-green running through the one shaped like something sat on a Nubian pear is actually a moss genus. He isn’t convinced the twisty half-disk wasn’t once a crustacean. He isn’t convinced said crustacean ever actually moved out. He carefully lifts the one least likely to be sentient. There’s a rock about the third the size of his fist, and a good dozen of them barely bigger than the bits of minced poultry he’d just had in his noodle dish. Hideous _and_ calibrated to be distractingly unbalanced. Devious.

“They’re magic space rocks,” Fox lies, _lies_ like those idiots from Shebs. Lies badly and remorselessly with nothing approaching plausible deniability. “All Force things and shit. I made em special by hand just for you and filled them with all my feelings for you.”

“When you say ‘made them’ did you mean on a commode?”

A frosty spoon taps chills against Gree’s left temple in deliberate statement. ‘This could have hit so much harder,’ it says. ‘Do not test me, I will win’ it says. Colt stares pleasantly. “I have vetoed toilet jokes,” he deadpans.

The threat rings heavy. Gree pushes the spoon away, and after a moment Colt lets him.

Neyo giggles.

“I work with children,” Fox grouses to the diner ceiling. “I come home to children. I go out to eat with children. What did I fucking do to deserve this?”

“Well,” Colt says, and the pleasantness continues to drip from his every word. “There was that time you waited until after I was hurled out on my head before you cuffed the mythical space magic boogeyman.”

He smiles. Fox grimaces back. He turns pointedly head-and-shoulders to Neyo. “You can pick next. Leave the ugliest one for our annoying littlest brother who we currently like the least.”

“You didn’t have to make up for _all_ the missed Life Days at once,” Neyo grouses, but he’s quick to choose the most brightly colored, all jaundiced yellows and nauseous greens. Colt takes the last, the one that looks like someone strung together only the grimiest duracrete chips littering a construction site, on sufferance. 

“So now we all have em,” Fox smarms and flashes his own wrist. _His_ bracelet rocks are mostly steel and gunmetal gray, and all about the size and shape of ball bearings. _His_ moronic bracelet is kitschy. Gree’s is travesty. The others are worse.

“You are actually an asshole,” Neyo murmurs, a little like a child finding finally seeing the family resemblance. He wrestles the thing on his wrist.

Gree has read up on peer pressure. He raised a teenage Jedi in a war, he’s _well_ aware of the effects of the social majority upon the individual. And yet Fox’s bastardly grin and Neyo’s theatrical pretense that he isn’t _thrilled_ at the gift work their psychological effect on him anyway. He slips the lumpy thing on his wrist and of course it sags distractingly. Fox rocks back on the back two legs of his chair. He beams, all teeth.

“Now you’re protected,” he lies. “And you’ll always think of me _just_ like I think of all of you.”

“I’m defecting to Torrent,” Colt decides and signals the hovering Roger for another round of whatever the cook felt like making that day.

* * *

_ The I CC You Group Chat: High Importance _

Neyo: First of all, don’t panic.

That, Gree thinks, is a terribly counterproductive way to open a conversation. And Barriss had _just_ started making noise at him about his blood pressure at his last checkup. He groans and fumbles under his bed for his blaster.

Karking Torrent. What the hell have they dragged Ney’ika into this time?

_ I CC YOU _

Doom: Delete this comm address. Now.

_ I CC YOU _

Doom: How did you get this address? I went through a _lot of trouble_ to make sure none of you assholes _had this address_.

_ I CC YOU _

Ponds: Tiplar and I have brunch dates.

_ I CC YOU _

Neyo: Second of all Gree and Colt? You know that vom-hideous rock bracelet shit Fox gave us?

_ I CC YOU _

Neyo: Apparently there’s cortosis in them.

_ I CC YOU _

Neyo: I may have found out the hard way.

Cortosis? _Cortosis?_ Gree stares at the offending bracelet he’s taken to carrying in a pocket. How did Fox find cortosis? Why did Fox _give them_ cortosis?

… how did Neyo find out?

_ I CC YOU _

Neyo: Someone send a Jedi.

_ I CC YOU _

Neyo: Not a rush though. Vaughn doesn’t think this guy is _actually_ Sith. He’s basically a kitten with a glowstick.

_ I CC YOU _

Neyo: Also Fox where did you get your wire? This stuff’s amazing. I got a full body bind out of it.

_ I CC YOU _

Fox: I’ll send you a spool.

Gree is armored out and out the door in under ten minutes. He has Barriss on one channel and Nova on the other, arranging where he’ll pick up Fisto.

He’s got Fox’s hideous bracelet wrapped carefully around his off-hand. Who knows what the hell else it can do? Karking magic space rocks.


End file.
